THE fatal shooting of a young Asian man at Stockwell Tube station yesterday morning is probably something most people thought they would never see in Britain.

But that was before the July 7 London bombings, and then the July 21 bombing attempts which made it clear that whoever is the enemy in our midst they are far from being satisfied with their devil's work to date.

Whether or not he was concealing explosives about his body is not yet confirmed, but he was a prime lead in the hunt for the bombers with almost certain connections to the crime and he was given an order to stop which he deliberately ignored - bolting for the train instead in the full knowledge that he was being pursued by armed police officers.

This is not the action of an innocent man, let alone one dressed for winter at the height of summer. Our police acted absolutely correctly in shooting to kill, for the train carriage into which he ran was full of innocent commuters. Had he been simply wounded, and had he been wired, he could have killed himself and all those around him instantly.

This is the grim reality of Britain today, and it is a face we had better get used to, for we are at war with an enemy that has used and abused our liberal and tolerant multi-ethnic society in order the better to try to overthrow it by indiscriminate violence and mass slaughter.

As the police themselves say, theirs is not so-much a shoot-to-kill policy but a shoot-to-protect one. To sceptics this may appear to be playing with words, but even if this were so it is better to play with words than innocent lives.